Entrepreneurship Lessons We’ve Learned from Steve Jobs

It’s been over a year since Steve Jobs passed away, but we’ve continued to think about how his life and his philosophy have affected entrepreneurs from all over the world. These are some lessons we’ve discovered we learned from Mr. Jobs, and they’re ones that every entrepreneur should embrace:

Never accept the status quo. Were always challenging our teams to do better, do to more difficult work, to take on more difficult projects, and to create new challenges to keep the job interesting. And we’re never satisfied with “good enough.” We want to be “better.”

Marry art and innovation. We are very big on technology meeting art. Everything we do has to look good, work well, and be engaging. Were working with a very large hospital system, and instead of making a boring app that just does the job, weve come up with creative, engaging ways to make it look good. The new designs have exceeded expectations so far with our test group.

Dont be afraid to fail. When we have failures, we learn from them. Its one less option to try on our path to a successful innovation outcome. We dont fear failure as long as we learn from it. We believe that if you become too successful at everything you do, you will stop innovating and finding ways to improve and be better.

Entrepreneurship is not a career that can sustain mediocrity. We expect excellence not only from ourselves, but also from each other. As leader, I am constantly praising my team, and equally asking them to fix things. We genuinely care about each other, so if having a basic paycheck or individualized success is a employees primary goal, they should leave, because entrepreneurship doesnt allow for any of that.

Surround yourself with talented people who want to get better at what they do. At Interapt, our employees are inherently self-motivated to challenge themselves to get better at what they do, and that makes us, as a company, stronger. There are no weak links in the chain.

Dont care about being right; care about succeeding. I couldn’t care less if Im right all of the time, but I surround myself with good people and theyll tell me when Im wrong. I empower my team to tell me so. They will tell me honestly when one of my ideas wont work. We all care about succeeding, not about being right. We want to continue growing our portfolio of big clients and successful projects. We all want to succeed for each other and with each other.